For this year’s MTV Video Music Awards, the music channel collaborated with Twitter and the good folks at Stamen to track social media activity throughout the event. The MTV VMA Twitter Tracker ranks the participating artists based on the amount of Tweets per minute. The application offers three different views on the incoming Tweets, All Activity, Top 4 and Single Artist. The user can tweet directly from the Flash based application to support his favorite artist.

The application is solely focused in the amount of Tweets does not go into more detail about location or sentiment. I think these attributes would have been interesting to include and could also provide more insights into what’s happening on stage.